Mutilated Humanity

Ashley Montagu

Presented at The Second International Symposium on Circumcision,
San Francisco, California, April 30-May 3, 1991.

Perhaps the
most profound name ever bestowed upon a species, was that given to
human beings by Karl Linnaeus in 1753 in his great book Systema
Naturae - namely, Homo Sapiens. Linnaeus briefly epitomized
this with the words; "Man, know thyself" (Homo nosce Te ipsum).
This sounds like an injunction, and it is; but it was also intended
to underscore the fact that human beings are the only creatures in
the world capable of self-consciousness and contemplation and characterized
by an unparalleled creativity.

Yet an impartial
survey of Homo sapiens' record since 1753, would suggest that
Oscar Wilde, as usual, was on the mark when he said that Homo sapiens
was the most premature definition ever given a species. A possible
improvement might be, in demotic English, "the wise guy, too clever
by far for his own good." Perhaps the more appropriate appellation
at this stage of human maldevelopment would be Homo sap, "the
addlepated one." Not that the wisdom is not there as a potentiality.
It is. Every child is born with the wisdom of its body and
of its mind, striving to develop and grow in an environment that satisfies
its basic behavioral needs, to grow and develop in physical and mental
health. By mental health I mean the ability to love, to work, to play,
and to think critically. Alas, this ability has been confused and
adulterated by adults, who have rarely consulted the child and have
instead ritually imposed their own adult confusions upon the child.
Perhaps that explains why most adults are largely deteriorated babies.
That is why to be born into the human family is to be in danger of
suffering the usual mental and sometimes physical mutilations to which
children are made to submit.

I think it would
be greatly to our advantage if, instead of calling ourselves Homo
sapiens, we called ourselves Homo mutilans, the mutilating
species, the species that mutilates both mind and body, often in the
name of reason, of religion, tradition, custom, morality, and law.
Were we to adopt such a name for our species, it might focus our attention
upon what is wrong with us and where we might begin setting ourselves
right.

In surveying
the history of humanity, we find that there is hardly a visible part
of the human body that has not been submitted to some form of mutilation.
For instance, some prehistoric peoples, to judge from their mural
art, left negative impressions of their hands from which parts of
the fingers had been removed.1
Such figures are known from several caves associated with the Old
Stone Age or Paleolithic Perigordian phase of culture of the Pyrenees,
dating back to some 25,000 years before the present. Such mutilations
have been not uncommon among indigenous peoples of our own day. The
story of bodily mutilations would occupy a large volume in the story
of humankind, and few would be more strange and interesting than those
relating to male and female circumcision.

By circumcision
we understand the cutting away in the male of the whole or a part
of the foreskin of the penis. In the female the operation is properly
described as excision and consists of the abscission of either
a part or the whole of the external genitalia; to this is frequently
added the operation of infibulation, the sewing together of
the parts of the vulva, leaving only a small opening for the release
of urine and menstrual blood.

Infibulation
- "the locking of the gate," as one Egyptian woman puts it - represents
the male invention of an artificial chastity girdle. Together, excision
and infibulation are known as Pharanoiac circumcision, from
the fact that it is first known to have been practiced in the time
of the pharaohs. As a generic term, both operations may be referred
to as circumcision.

The most difficult
question with which the anthropologist is confronted is the origin
of any custom. The truth is that it is generally not possible to answer
most questions relating to origins. All sorts of explanations have
been offered for the origin of circumcision, and those speculations
seem almost as numerous as the autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa. Studies
of the cultures in which such mutilations are customary suggests that
the underlying motivations for them, whatever their origins may have
been, are very different from what the usual explanations have to
offer. Since those motivations have been obscured by millennia of
mythological, religious, ritualistic, and secular rationalizations,
it is very unlikely that anyone, with the exception of an unprejudiced
inquirer, can arrive at a reasonable explanation of their origins.
It is here that we come abruptly upon the problem of the social construction
of reality - or as Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann put it, "the
collective hunch that reality is ... not all reality, but certainly
all social reality."2
Bruno Bettelheim, in his book Symbolic Wounds,3
made a valiant and stimulating attempt at an explanation (from a psychoanalytic
point of view) of the motivation underlying various forms of circumcision;
but as he lacked sufficient anthropological sophistication, he wandered
somewhat astray.

The first thing
to be noted about circumcision is that it represents a rite of passage,
usually (but not always) performed as a ritual or a ceremony. It may
be performed shortly after birth and at any time up to and including
adult years. Male circumcision is customarily performed by men, while
female circumcision is routinely performed by women. However, a survey
of the evidence indicates that there can be little doubt that both
practices were instituted by men. In every case, with the exception
of the rare instances in which circumcision of the male has been performed
by a woman, it is carried out by members of the group who have themselves
undergone the mutilation. Those who, for one reason or another, have
not been circumcised are not considered proper members of the group
and in many cases are shunned as if they are outcasts. In aboriginal
Australia, no one would accept food from the hand of a youth who had
not been circumcised, nor would anyone eat in the presence of a man
from an uncircumcising tribe, for he would be considered spiritually
unclean. This was the customary response to the uncircumcised among
many peoples.4 Furthermore,
in most (if not in all) of those societies in which excision is practiced,
no man would marry an uncircumcised woman, and no woman would marry
an uncircumcised man.

Circumcision
was unknown among the Assyrians and Babylonians, while among the Israelites,
males were circumcised as a preliminary to marriage and the keeping
of the Passover. Because Moses of the bulrushes had not been circumcised,
the Hebrew god tried to kill him; but Zipporah, the Midianite priest's
daughter, saved him from that fate by taking "a sharp stone" and cutting
off her son's foreskin. She cast it upon Moses' penis saying, "Surely
a bridegroom of blood art thou to me" and, by this vicarious circumcision,
became Moses' wife, thus succeeding in assuaging their god's wrath
(Exodus 4:24).

When the prince
of She'chem in the land of Canaan appealed to the sons of Jacob to
unite with his people through marriage, the sons replied, "To this
we will consent unto you if ye will be as we be, that every male of
you be circumcised" (Genesis 34:14-17). The "sharp stone" suggests
that the operation dates back to a period when the rite was performed
with a flint knife - that is, to the Old Stone Age or Paleolithic.
That Zipporah cut off her son's foreskin may mean that in early times
circumcision was on occasion performed by the mother.

In ancient Egypt,
circumcision appears to have been practiced from the earliest dynasties
- that is, more than 6,000 years before the present - and is thought
to have been of independent invention there (though the proximity
of areas such as those known today as the Sudan and Chad, where mutilation
appears to have been long established, may raise a doubt as to its
independent invention). In any event, what makes Egyptian circumcision
especially interesting is that the scholarly evidence indicates that,
no matter where and upon whom it was practiced, it represented a sign
of affiliation to the cult of sun god, Amon-Re, chief deity and creator
of all things. Part of the Egyptian cosmogonic myth suggests that
Amon-Re mutilated his genitals in some way. From Classical Greek sources,
we know that the surgery appears to have been a privilege of the priestly
castes.

In her book,
Prisoners of Ritual,5
Hanny Lightfoot-Klein thinks it conceivable that female circumcision
dates back "to the early beginnings of mankind." I think that unlikely,
for the reason that early societies probably tended to be egalitarian
and that male-dominator societies were a quite late development in
human history.6
In egalitarian societies, such as most hunter-gathererr societies,
female circumcision does not occur, and male circumcision is rare.
This should provide a further clue to the deep origins of circumcision
and to the probability that it was males who invented these mutilation.

The Australian
aborigines are an interesting case in point. This remarkable people
has lived continuously on the continent of Australia for at least
60,000 years. Circumcision as well as subincision were widely practiced
throughout the greater part of Australia,7
but we have no idea when it was first instituted. Some 700 tribes
were known to have flourished in aboriginal Australia at the time
of the European settlement in the 18th Century; 89 however, to be
so widely distributed over this very large continent among so many
different tribes, circumcision - and possibly subincision - must be
of considerable antiquity.

Years ago, when
I first learned of subincision - the remarkable practice of cutting
upon the ventral portion of the penile urethra, sometimes from the
glans to the scrotum - I puzzled over its origin and meaning until
I found that, among the Aranda of Central Australia, the subincised
penis was called by the same name as the female vulva. Upon further
study of the literature on the subject of similar practices in many
other cultures, it became clear that subincision was designed to cause
the male organ to resemble the vulva, and that the effusion of blood
was regarded as serving the same function as menstruation, which in
the female enabled her naturally to dispose of the evil humors that
accumulate in the body. To continue the same effect, males periodically
engaged in incision of the penis and called it menstruation.10

Australian societies
were egalitarian, and while the circumcision and subincision of males
was practiced, no genital operations were performed on females. It
therefore seems correct to postulate that there may be some correlation
between male dominance of a society and the practice of female genital
circumcision.

Now let us see
how circumcision is typically regarded among some African peoples
like the Dogon, Bambara, and Lobi of Mali (northwest Africa). Among
these peoples the fundamental law of creation is twinship. At birth,
each infant is "twin," - doubled, equipped with twin souls of different
sex. In the girl the masculine soul resides in the clitoris, which
is considered her male organ. In the male, removal of the prepuce,
in which the female soul resides, confirms the boy in the sex for
which he was destined. Excision, which ablates the clitoris, rids
the girl of the male element. However, as Pierre Erny, writes in his
book, Childhood and Cosmos:

Even after these operations have
been imposed by social life, duality remains the fundamental law
of beings. The soul of the opposite sex, diminished in the body,
remains present in the double. The person will find his twinned
unity again only at the time of marriage. Through the union of
husband and wife, the doubles join like bodies in the act which
actualizes the ideal union of twins. After circumcision it is
the man's duty to go after his lost femininity and find it again
in his wife. And the woman who was freed from her masculinity
at the time of excision finds it again in the person of her husband.11

Here is an illuminating
passage from Dominique Zahan's book, Societes d'Initiation Bambara,
Le N'Domo, Le Kore, on the Bambara, N'Domo, and Kore, also of
Northwest Africa:

Circumcision seeks to generate a twofold purification
of the human person...From the physical point of view it ends
one state and opens another. It puts an end to man as individual,
and marks the debut of Homo socialis. Through the removal of his
prepuce, man loses the harmony inherent in his androgynous person,
and shorn of the ballast of his femininity (represented by the
cut off organ) runs after a woman, gets married, and creates the
community. In the human entity circumcision represents an interruption
of continuity; it dissociates man from himself: from what formerly
was one, it makes two, namely, a person who becomes a social human
being.

And so its "work" has an irreversible character. Zahn continues:

In the spiritual realm the function of circumcision
is still more nuanced. By circumcising man the blacksmith (who
customarily performs the operation) takes away the "femininity"
from his spirit, that is, the cloudiness in his understanding,
the wanzo. The wanzo is the agent of ignorance and
foulness of spirit. Wanzo makes intelligence opaque and
hinders knowledge of oneself and god, covering it as with a veil.
It is opposed to the full actualization of man from the social-religious
point of view, and hinders self-control and understanding of the
role of suffering.

All human training can be considered as a fight
against the wanzo, the element that will cause one to become
a confused, idiotic human being, which will cloud the intelligence
and render one utterly useless to the community.

Circumcision promotes enlightenment of the spirit
by refining understanding. The darkening of the spirit is intimately
related to the femininity of the male child, which appears as
a defect in his masculinity, and is testified to by the presence
of a prepuce. If he is to become a stable being, capable of complying
with social life, the child must be freed from it.

For the
most part, the wanzo flows away into the earth with the
blood of circumcision. It is only then that the adolescent is
allowed to get married. Anyone would refuse to marry a partner
who has not been completely freed of wanzo. With the removal
of the wanzo by circumcision, the male, although a full
being on the metaphysical level, is yet impermeable to the knowledge
of the other, especially to the knowledge of God. This refining
makes man able to make use of his intelligence and at the same
time puts him in the best possible state of receptivity to what
he is taught.

For the circumcised one, deprived
of his wanzo, remains alone with his masculinity, that
is, with the very basis for the activity of the spirit. In imitation
of what takes place on the physical and social level, where man,
deprived of his material femininity, commits himself to finding
again a woman companion, circumcision of the understanding leads
to the pursuit of another femininity, femininity in the mystical
realm, which will allow him to have union with femininity through
the woman.12

There is much
else to be reported on these enlightening and important views of these
peoples which, however they may vary elsewhere in the world, are representative
of a system of beliefs that stands at the very core of their lives.
It is an intricate system of beliefs of so sacred a nature, and so
profoundly a part of their being, that it is difficult to imagine
their ever living free of them.

It is, therefore,
unrealistic to refer to such beliefs as barbaric or cruel, for that
is not what they are conceived to be by the peoples whose lives they
govern and to which they willingly conform.

Fundamentally
what must be understood is that, whatever the origins of circumcision
beliefs and practices, they are the doing of men, and everywhere they
appear to spring from the same motivation: the desire of men to establish
their superior status and supremacy over others who, by some recognizable
mark of difference (such as age or sex) they regard as being in another
class or caste, inferior to themselves. This makes it a "natural"
thing for the powerful to subject the helpless to their will, all
this in the service and maintenance of their supremacy in the caste
system, which is (in most cases) the reaction to a feeling of deep
inadequacy that remains unadmitted to consciousness either at the
emotional or intellectual level and becomes an adamant part of the
socially constructed reality.

The tyranny
of the older over the younger, aided by a powerful mystique of patriotism,
enables them to send untold numbers of the young off to war - for
old soldiers never die, just young ones do. In a world of artificially
created ultra-nationalism, when the bugle blows, all reason is abandoned.
It is as simple as that.

The tyranny
of well-meaning parents over their children, which often amounts to
an often unintended emotional and intellectual abuse, also applies
to teachers who, unwittingly enough, transmit the values of the dominant
sex.

It is the abuse
of the power of the physically strong over the weak by those who find
if difficult to love others, whose love is of the unloving masculine
kind, whose tyrannies - already enshrined in the darker pages of history
- continue in many despotic, not least domestic, ways. The sorry story
of Middle Eastern religions concerning women, most notably in the
Bible and in the Koran, the witchhunts sanctioned by the church; the
subjugation of women; the doctrine of Original Sin; the dismal view
of children; the religious and secular wars of mankind, in which the
psychology of war has predominated in the making of peace - all this
and much else testifies to the inescapable fact that, compared to
women and children, men have played a mutilating role, very much in
the psychological as well as in the physical sense.

In recent years,
we have suddenly discovered that the abuse of children is rather more
frequent than was generally believed. But with the exception of a
few heroic people like Fran Hosken - who, without institutional support
of any kind, has for many years valiantly attempted to draw the attention
of the world to the atrocities committed upon young girls in the form
of circumcision - there have been very few activists to protest against
circumcision, male or female. Today, now that child abuse has come
to be recognized as a widespread psychopathy in America, it may be
easier for people to perceive circumcision as a form of child abuse.

This operative
assault - whether shortly after birth or later - is obviously a highly
traumatic experience for the child. One cannot help but wonder what
effects such traumatic experiences may have upon later life. Today
we have abundant evidence that the process of birth is a traumatic
experience for the baby. Some of the readily detectable effects can
be seen in the structure and growth of the bones, as well as in the
general appearance of the child.

What is called
for is a well-thought-out approach to the eradication of antiquated
beliefs and practices which cause so much needless suffering, mutilation,
tragedy, and death - an approach that takes into consideration all
those factors I have mentioned, and more. We can begin with carefully
designed programs, possibly under the auspices of the United Nations
(or a similar body), with the purpose of rendering obsolete the practice
of circumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification
whatever and no place in a civilized society.